Brooklyn's Big Sue, LLC is a veteran of New York City's sustainable building scene. In this episode of Brooklyn Informed, we talk to Big Sue partner Susan Boyle about one of the company's cooler projects: a Prospect Heights brewery icehouse they bought in 2004 and converted into a six-unit residential building. The structure is an excellent portrait of sustainable construction, with two green......read more
Brad Temkin has been documenting human impact on the contemporary landscape for over 30 years. For Rooftop, his latest series, the Chicago-based photographer chronicles the burgeoning green roof movement taking place on top of city buildings all over the world. The beautifully-composed, large-format photos serve as exemplary records of the cultural shift towards sustainable......read more
Belgian architectural firm JDS Architects recently completed a project in Copenhagen that features one of the coolest green roofs we've seen yet. The highlight of the Hedonistic Rooftop Penthouses project is a "missing garden" above the apartments that provides residents with a private and safe place to play and enjoy the outdoors. The rooftop garden features a playground with shock-absorbing......read more
Boston practice Peter Rose + Partners has recently completed the Island Residence, a summer vacation home situated among dense woods on the island of Chappaquiddick near Edgartown, Massachusetts. Say the architects: "The house is part of a collection of environment†and landscapeâ€centric interventions that blur the boundaries between structures and landscape, and between inside and......read more
The 2010 Environmental Performance Index, which ranks the world's nations according to environmental policy and performance, was released last week at the World Economic Forum. The index is compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers. Leading the rankings is Iceland, which is powered almost entirely by renewable energy sources. Rounding out the top 5 are Switzerland,......read more
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On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Actress Sigourney Weaver testified before the Senate, warning that without climate legislation limiting CO2 emissions, the impacts on our oceans will be monumental. “The oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were during pre-industrial times and if we continue burning fossil fuels as we are now, we will double the ocean’s acidity by the end......read more
Environmental advocates and allies have achieved plenty since the first Earth Day forty years ago: the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, are just a few of the legislative highlights that come to mind. But, as John Kerry warned today, the U.S. has yet to confront the biggest environmental problem of today: climate change. In......read more
With workers struggling to contain the growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, the White House has the declared the situation a disaster of "national significance." The designation paves the way for an all-out federal response to the potential environmental disaster. Yesterday, top officials were dispatched to the region to help coordinate defences against the leak. Meanwhile, the......read more
With bad weather hampering efforts to hold back the massive oil slick growing off the Gulf Coast, U.S. President Barack Obama called the situation a "massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster," promising that his administration will do everything it can to stop it and clean it up. President Obama made his remarks from Venice, La., where he arrived yesterday to survey......read more